If You're Still Breathing
by Emma Arthur
Summary: Post-finale. John recovers from his injuries and learns to live without Clarice, while Marcos and Lorna do their best to support him and deal with their own issues. They all have to figure out how to go on, somehow.
1. Chapter 1

[mentions of death and wanting to die, pain, injuries, blood]

The show left us with quite a large gap between the battles and the last scene. This is my take on what happens in between.

I'm not entirely sure yet where this is going, whether it will stop before Clarice's return or extend beyond it, or even become entirely AU. I'm trying to keep it fairly short, but I know me: that's probably not going to happen.

Title, for once, is from a song: Youth, by Daughter (if you don't know it, it was the one playing during Sonya's memorial).  
_If you're still breathing, you're the lucky one_  
_'Cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs_  
_Setting fire to our insides for fun_  
_Collecting names of the lovers that went wrong_

* * *

John almost expects Erg to do something, to stop him from killing Turner−or maybe encourage him, after all Erg probably wants revenge for what the man did to his home and his people. But Erg just waits as John hesitates, the knife in his hand shaking more and more as his remaining energy fades.

Turner would be dead already if John hadn't been injured, weakened by pain and blood loss. A single punch should have felled him, yet after several he's still looking up at John, with no fear in his eyes.

"I'm ready to see my little girl," he says. "Just do it, man."

John falters, his arm giving out under him.

"Kill me!"

He nearly does it, right then, plunge the knife deep into Turner's chest where he knows it will kill him instantly. Not for revenge. Just to end this.

Except it won't end anything for John, will it? He'll still be here, alive, with the Clarice-shaped hole in his heart and another death to carry on his shoulders.

With a growl of pain, John drops the knife, away from either of them, and rolls off Turner's body. He lies there, beside the man who murdered Clarice and tortured him, and wishes for another kind of end. The one he came here looking for, today.

His thoughts stray toward Marcos, Lorna and the Struckers. He wonders if they managed to get Lauren and Andy back, if they stopped Reeva after all. He wonders if it should matter to him more than it does.

He feels numb. His whole body is on fire, yet the pain feels far away, disconnected.

"Thunderbird! _John_!" someone is calling. John blinks his eyes open sluggishly.

Erg is leaning over him, shaking his shoulder.

"Hm," John mutters, struggling to get his body to obey him.

"We have to get away from here. The police will be here soon."

John makes a weak attempt at sitting up, but almost falls right back down. Erg pulls on his arm and ducks under it to shift John's weight onto his shoulders.

"Come on, I'm strong, but not strong enough to carry you," he says.

"Just gimme a sec," John murmurs.

He's dizzy from pain and bloodloss, and the feeling of the bullets shifting inside him with every move is nauseating. He uses his left arm to pull himself up, but it gives out under him again.

"Just lean on me," Erg says.

John gives in and lets Erg pull him upright, if upright is even a proper term for the hunched-over position that is the only one the wounds in his stomach will let him take. Thankfully Erg's mutation does seem to make him stronger than most people, and he's able to hold John up even when his left leg won't take his weight.

"We need to get down into the tunnels," Erg says, guiding them back toward the end of the alley. "They won't find us there. There's an entrance a hundred yards away."

John doesn't bother answering, keeping all his focus on not being a dead weight. With the adrenaline receding, his body is shutting down fast.

The most delicate part is going down the metal ladder inside the manhole. They can't go two abreast, and John is in no state to hold on to ladder rungs, let alone know how to place his hands and feet.

They somehow make it down without falling, mostly thanks to the fact that there isn't far to climb. The tunnel underneath is barely taller than Erg, its floor made of cracked concrete and foul mud. John stumbles through, still holding on to Erg's shoulders.

"The main room isn't far," Erg encourages him. "We'll find medical supplies there."

By the time they make it, John isn't putting any weight at all on his left leg and he's moaning with every step. Erg takes him to an overturned chair that he barely has time to put back upright before John drops onto it, spent.

"Stay here," Erg says, and John wonders absently where he thinks he might go in this state.

He doesn't know how long he grits his teeth through the pain, focusing on staying mostly upright and not sliding down to the floor, before Erg comes back with his hands full of bandages and supplies.

"Will you let me have a look?" he waves at John's torso.

John nods, trying to uncurl as much as possible. One wound in his side makes it nearly impossible, and he groans.

"I'm going to cut off your clothes," Erg says. "We can always find you new ones later."

"'kay," John murmurs. He doesn't have the energy to argue, or even to feel embarrassed at Erg seeing him like that. It's not like he even cares, anyway. There isn't a lot left he cares about.

There's Marcos and Lorna, and the Struckers, gone for hours now into danger. The kids, kidnapped and forced to do God knows what. And Clarice, her presence still at the edge of his consciousness. Stronger, down here.

Erg has a hard time removing the cloth stuck into his wounds, even after cutting his shirt and jeans into pieces. John does his best to breathe through the pain, but he can't keep a few groans from passing his lips. He nearly topples from the chair more than once.

Erg cleans the wounds with actual disinfectant, stingy as hell but better than the pure alcohol John has used too many times before. Some of the bullets still embedded in his skin are close enough to the surface for Erg to take out with a knife. He spends a while checking each wound, while John grits his teeth. He's losing too much blood.

"I can't get to most of the bullets," Erg says, trying to remove the one in John's right arm, outside of his field of vision.

"Leave them in," John says. "Just stop the bleeding."

"They could get infected."

"It wouldn't be the first time. And Lorna can get them out later, if−" John trails off.

"Alright," Erg nods. "This one is really deep, it went far into the muscle," he adds, pointing to John's leg.

"I'm not even sure that was just one bullet," John says. "Some of those guys had automatic guns."

"Hm. You won't want to walk on that too much."

"I noticed," John says dryly.

Bullets have pierced his skin in more places than he can count, but that one in his thigh is the most painful, beside the one low in his side that's seriously starting to worry him. It still pulses with blood, and John can hear a gurgling sound just at the edge of his perception. It can't have hit an artery or he'd be dead already, but John has learned just enough about anatomy to know that it can't be good.

The best Erg can do is pack his wounds with gauze and hope John doesn't bleed out before...before what? Getting out of here and into a safer place is not the end goal. There is no medical attention to be received, beyond Caitlin's limited knowledge, if she's even still alive. And then what?

"You're running a fever," Erg notices.

"I know," John answers. His teeth have been shattering for the last ten minutes at least. He's colder than he's been in years, he who never feels the temperature.

"Don't move," Erg says.

He looks through several tents before he comes back with a blanket. He drapes it carefully over John's shoulders. John nods gratefully. It doesn't make much of a difference, but at least he feels a little less exposed.

"I'll try to find you some pants. Let's see, Mason was about the right size." Erg pauses sadly at that.

"Thanks," John says when he comes back with a pair of sweatpants. "I don't want to−"

"He won't need them any more. But you do. You're freezing."

John's body has seized up, and he's shaking too much to do more than let Erg dress him. He should hate this, being vulnerable in front of a man he barely knows, a man he actively resented until today. But he has no strength left for that kind of feeling.

Even talking is getting harder. Thinking. The fog taking over his brain is one he knows intimately, made of pain and exhaustion. Everything feels far away, like the world around him is not real anymore.

"I need to clean the blood off your face," Erg says. "Can I take off that ridiculous face paint too?"

"Says the guy...with the eye patch and the brand," John articulates with difficulty.

Erg actually smiles. "Well, can I?"

"Sure. It's war paint. I'm not in any shape...to fight now."

"You left him alive," Erg states.

"Clarice...she wouldn't want his death...on my hands. Not like that."

"No, you're right. She wasn't one for revenge."

John looks up at him, this man who only knew Clarice for all of a few weeks, yet has so much pain in his voice talking about her.

"It's why she...joined the Underground, though," he says. "Her foster parents were killed. She was...so angry."

"I didn't know that," Erg says, starting to wipe his face with a wet cloth.

"But she didn't stay...for revenge."

"She stayed for you."

John shakes his head, looking away.

"I could see it," Erg insists. "I offered to her to come here from the first day, but I could see she was staying for you. She already knew the Underground was falling apart."

"She left," John murmurs.

"She couldn't take it anymore. She left to protect herself."

"And she died."

Erg sighs.

"I am sorry," he says, his voice so low John wouldn't hear it without his enhanced hearing.

John doesn't answer. Even talking about Clarice doesn't hurt as much, like his emotions have faded away, left the edges of the hole, of the _miss_ and the _need_ to fly away, like his body already knows he's closer to joining her.

He hears her, suddenly. It's hasn't happened in hours, since he left the apartment, but she's here again. Of course, she lived here. Her trace remains.

She died here, too, John realized. He was in the alley when he saw her get shot through the portal, but this is where she died.

"Where−" he starts, but his body is taken by a sudden wracking cough.

Erg holds him up as he coughs, so he doesn't fall off the chair. John is nearly limp in his arms, except for the hiccups.

"Where was she?" John asks when it finally recedes, when he can open his mouth again without fear of throwing up.

"Clarice?" Erg asks. John notices he's stopped calling her Blink. He called her Clarice before, in the alley, too. John was too surprised to pay attention.

He nods.

"She made her portal by the wall," Erg says slowly. "The Purifiers came from that side."

John notices, too, for the first time, the area on the other side of the room where boxes and tents are overturned, reduced to pieces. The scene of the shootout. There are bodies still lying there.

He looks back up at Erg, who's followed his gaze.

"I'll have to do something for them," Erg says. "Later."

"They were...your friends," John murmurs. "I'm...sorry too."

"Thank you. Now let's get you lying down before you fall."

He ducks under John's arm again and carries most of his weight, as John grits his teeth. The tent Erg leads him to is small, with a camp bed inside.

John can tell immediately who slept here. Her scent hasn't left, it assaults him so strongly that his reaction makes Erg stumble.

"Sorry," he mutters. "It's just−"

"You can feel her," Erg understands. "I'm sorry. I did not think about it that way. Do you want to go somewhere else?"

"No," John says, removing his arm from Erg's shoulders and lowering himself as carefully as possible onto the bed. He doesn't have the strength to move anymore, and Clarice's scent is actually comforting.

Seeing her everywhere has been agony ever since her portal closed in front of him, but now it feels welcoming. It should worry him, John knows. It means his mind is giving up.

He catches Erg's wrist before the man can turn away.

"Marcos, Lorna..." he says. "Can you find them?"

"I'll try," Erg answers.

John settles against the pillow and watches him move away, skirting around the tents and furniture with practiced ease. He soon disappears into a tunnel, and John is left alone in the large room.

He brings his hand slowly to his collar, finding first his traditional medicine bag. He squeezes it for a moment, then looks for his dog tags. He carries the trinkets, the memories everywhere with him: Pulse's dog tag against his heart, his family and tribe in the little pouch, the watch Dreamer got for him ages ago, and the slightly crooked beaded leather bracelet Clarice made him, when he taught her how to bead.

They're all gone, now.

The darkness, the abyss looming in front of John, as his eyes close by themselves and his body goes lax, don't scare him. Maybe his friends will be there when he wakes up.

And if he doesn't, maybe he'll finally get the rest he longs for.

* * *

This first chapter was fairly short, but Lorna and Marcos are coming in chapter two. I hope to post it soon, though it's not even finished and I don't have much beyond that.

The whole story is going to be more reflexive than anything else, dealing with grief and friendships and recovering, though with a healthy dose of whump.

Tell me if you've enjoyed this chapter, I'd really like to hear your thoughts!

You can also find me on Tumblr (theemmaarthur).


	2. Chapter 2

Here is the second chapter, finally. I hesitated to post it because I still haven't finished the third chapter, but I realized I'm leaving you hanging anyway, so you might as well have something to read :)

Lorna and Marcos get to the junkyard, and realized John hasn't made it back. A scene that was really missing from the finale, in my opinion.

Enjoy!

* * *

It takes Lorna only a moment, as she and Marcos watch Caitlin walk up to her children, to confirm that John hasn't made it back to the junkyard. If he had, he would be here waiting for them.

Reed's death, the violence of his explosion of power taking the top floors of the Inner Circle's building, the fight in the parking lot, it's all been harrowing, traumatic. Lorna can still feel her hands trembling, Marcos almost veered off the road several times on the way back. And Caitlin...she's been stoical somehow, holding on tight, but she's now sobbing in her children's arms.

But none of it could make Lorna forget completely that they left John to die here, in front of the apartment complex. Because if one thing was obvious, it's that John didn't expect to make it out alive.

She grabs Marcos's hand. "We need to go look for John," she says.

"Shouldn't we−" Marcos starts, nodding toward the Struckers.

"They're safe. They're together. John..."

"Let's go," Marcos nods.

"Where do we start?"

"He could have gone back to the apartment, if the police haven't stormed it. And...we need to check where we left him."

Where they left him, in front of the building. If there's anything still there, it will be police cars and dead bodies. John's dead body.

Lorna takes a deep breath, willing the panic away.

What if they never find him? What if he's lying in a dumpster somewhere, or taken to the morgue already?

No, John can't be dead. Lorna won't believe it, won't even think it, until she had irrefutable proof.

She nods and follows Marcos back outside. They don't need the car for this, the back of the apartment building is just on the other side of the road.

"Should we tell them, though?" Marcos waves toward the Struckers.

"Leave them be," Lorna says. "They need this moment. And we can't waste anymore time."

They could be too late already. John could be losing blood in an alley somewhere.

The panic is here again. Lorna struggles to breathe, even when she concentrates on it. She squeezes Marcos's hand tightly.

"We'll find him," he murmurs. "We have to."

They go up to the apartments first, since they get in though the back of the building. Everything is quiet both in and outside. The building wasn't even fully evacuated, and now all has gone back to normal. Through the windows of Marcos's empty apartment, Lorna can make out crime scene tape out in the street, but there's no more police cars.

John's apartment is just as empty. He has barely been in here since Clarice's death, and it's a mess. He clearly hasn't been taking care of himself. There are week-old dirty dishes in the sink, and the bedroom is littered with unfolded clothes−all John's. Clarice's side of the bed hasn't been touched.

There is no sign that John came back here. The war paint bowl he made before leaving is still on the table, like time stopped the moment he passed that door.

Zingo welcomes them into the Struckers' place, whining. She's been alone in here most of the day, and the gunshots and sirens must have frightened her. Marcos hugs her and calms her down as well as he can, when he himself is too strung up to even sit down.

"Should we take her with us?" Lorna asks. "She might find John better than we will."

"Okay," Marcos says, taking her leash. "We're not going to find anything here. Let's go down to the street."

They're careful to keep Zingo quiet, down there. The police and the Purifiers might be gone, but there could always be somebody lurking around.

Lorna can feel dozens of shell casings and fallen bullets on the floor, though it's too dark to see them. She can't help reliving the last image she got of John, in the SUV's rearview mirror, his chest already bleeding, the holes in his shirt. She shivers.

"You cold?" Marcos murmurs.

Lorna looks at him and she can see they're having the same flashback, to the day everything went wrong. The day she was arrested. Marcos asked her the same thing then. So much of what happened since seems to stem from that night.

"No, just...scared," Lorna admits. She doesn't want to relive that night. She doesn't want to think about what happened here today, in this street, but they have to. "What if they...took his body somewhere?"

"I really, really hope not," Marcos says. There's a shine in his eyes, and edge in his voice. He's just as worried as Lorna.

What are the chances that John actually made it out?

Lorna kneels down and holds out the tee-shirt she picked up in John's room to Zingo. "Can you find him, Zingo?" she asks.

The dog sniffs the cloth and moans. "Yes, I know. That's why we need to find him."

They walk down the street for a bit before Zingo picks up a trail. She perks up suddenly and pulls on her leash. Marcos picks up his pace behind her. She only slows down a few streets over, in an alley also slashed with police tape.

"He was here, uh?" Marcos asks Zingo. She sniffs around, but doesn't move.

Lorna looks around her. It's too dark to see properly, but there doesn't seem to be any damage in the alley, which means that whatever happened here was between people. John, probably. And Purifiers. Jace Turner, maybe, who seemed so bloodthirsty. There are few people Lorna hates as much as this man, in this moment.

"Eclipse," a deep voice calls from the end of the alley. Marcos and Lorna both freeze. The man is still in the shadows, but Marcos relaxes minutely as soon as he steps closer.

"Erg," he says. "What are you doing here?"

So this is the infamous Erg, Lorna thinks. He's tall and menacing, from where she stands. She spots the shadow of the eye patch Marcos described to her.

"I was looking for you," Erg says. "You are Polaris, I assume?" he nods to Lorna.

Lorna just nods back curtly.

"What do you want?" Marcos asks.

"Your friend...John...he's alive. Down in the tunnels."

Lorna's knees nearly give out under her. She steadies herself by holding on to Marcos, the relief flooding over her.

"How is he?"

"Injured, but alive. He asked me to find you."

Lorna closes her eyes briefly. Trust John, even injured, to be worried about them. Though given how close they came to not making it out, that one of them _didn't_, he wasn't wrong to be.

It's just that Lorna almost forgot about John, while she fought alongside Marcos in the parking garage.

"_Just promise me that you're gonna fight."_

She fought. She fought with everything she had, like they all did, but John and Reed are the one who walked into the danger fully expecting not to make it out. Who gave everything for their families, for their friends.

"_I just need to last long enough to get them away from the gate."_

And now Reed is dead, and John…

"Take us to him," she says, her voice shaking more than she would like.

"Come with me."

They follow Erg down a manhole and into a network of tunnels, silently. Erg does not seem the talkative type to Lorna, and she has a lot on her mind. Images of John badly injured keep imposing themselves on her, but the look on his face earlier, the deep well of pain and the emptiness she could see there, was somehow even worse.

"_Jace Turner took Clarice from me. He can't do anything worse."_

Lorna has been imagining her reunion with John since the day she chose to ask for the Underground's help. No, even earlier. The day she helped get John out of the Purifier's compound, when she pulled the pellets out of his skin and ran before he could say a word to her. Perhaps even, deep within her, since the night she turned her back on him in Nashville.

It was never like that in her dreams. John would shout at her, argue for hours, or just look at her in disappointment and give her a cold shoulder. He would refuse her excuses and her apologies and tell her all the hurtful things on his mind. He would hit her maybe−though Lorna knows too well that John would never forgive himself for that.

He would care. He would show feelings, of anger and disgust and hate perhaps, and love. And Lorna would hate it, but she would take it because she deserves everything he could throw at her.

But John just hugged her, swallowing hard, and then he looked away. The pain in his gaze had little to do with her.

Lorna wonders if it's selfish of her, to want something more, to want her best friend, her brother, to be angry because that means his pain is one that can heal. To want him to rage at her for what she's done, because it would mean he hasn't become a stranger in the months she's been gone.

The people she's coming back to aren't the ones she left behind. They're harder, rougher somehow. Marcos still looks at her like she's his whole world, but he flinches every time she moves away, like he's terrified she'll disappear again. And John is in a world of pain that allows no one else inside.

Clarice, the girl Lorna never got to know properly−but she wants to, now, because Clarice must have been someone truly amazing for John to love her this much−is dead by her fault. How will John rise again from losing a third partner, a third love, in as many years? Can he make it through this at all?

Lorna is deep in her thoughts when they come to an opening in the tunnel. She's taken aback by the large room around them, filled with tents and seemingly random pieces of makeshift furniture.

"This is where the Morlocks lived," Marcos says at her questioning gaze. Erg only nods, dark and brooding. This was his home, Lorna realize. His home that was destroyed by Purifiers−and by Reeva. Lorna has her responsibility in this too.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs. Erg probably lost friends here too. Lorna remembers mourning for the Atlanta station, her own home for years. For Sonya, and for all the friends she left behind. Marcos was not the only one she couldn't forget.

"They are...avenged, now," Erg says.

"Did Turner−" Marcos hesitates.

"He did not die. John...chose not to end his life. It's a decision I can respect."

"Reeva Page is dead," Lorna says. "It was the only way to stop her."

Erg nods. "Good," is his only comment. "He's over here," he indicates the center of the room.

John has started to sit up on the bed he's on before Lorna even spots him. He's probably heard them come closer. His blanket slips away as he sits up, and Lorna can see his torso and arms are covered in makeshift bandages. Even from here, she can indistinctly feel the bullets under his skin. Too many of them. She could carry him just by moving them.

John doesn't quite manage to make it to his feet before Marcos and Lorna reach him. He tries, one hand pressing on his side, but his legs clearly won't take his weight.

"Don't move," Lorna whispers, kneeling at his side. "We're here."

"You're alive," John rasps. The relief in his voice is as painful as the one overtaking Lorna's throat.

Marcos crouches beside them and grabs John by the back of the neck, which seems to be the only part of his body that's not bandaged or bleeding. Their brows meet briefly, and Marcos closes his eyes.

"You're alive too," he murmurs. "I was−" His voice breaks.

"I'm alright," John says.

"You have more bullets in you than I can count," Lorna frowns.

"It's okay," John answers vaguely, never taking his eyes away from her face. It feels like he's trying to engrave her into his memory.

Lorna reaches out to put her arms around him gently, but John leans into her, tightening the hug despite his injuries. It almost hurts. John has always had trouble checking his strength when he's sick or injured.

That thought startles Lorna. She hasn't thought like that in a long time. She hasn't been around anyone she knows that well, enough to distinguish the tiny nuances of behavior, for a long time. She hasn't been around _John_. In that moment, she realizes how much she's missed him−and simultaneously, how much he's missed her, when he half-sobs in her shoulder. Her throat tightens even further.

"Let's get you home," Marcos says. "Or do you want to−"

His hesitation is palpable, wanting to give John the ability to decide for himself, despite how tired they all are, how much they just want to drop on a bed and sleep for a century. John needs medical attention, but more than that he needs his friends to support him.

"Home," John repeats. It doesn't sound like an answer exactly, more like a way of processing the question. "Yes," he adds after a while. "Are the apartments−"

"Safe, as far as we could tell, but we should probably wait until the morning to be sure. I was thinking of the junkyard. Caitlin and..." Marcos trails off.

John doesn't know about Reed yet. He's in no state to process yet another loss, but he needs to be told.

"Reed. Reeva," John begins to understand even before Lorna can formulate it in her head, but he doesn't seem to find more words than that.

"Reeva's dead," Lorna says. "And the Frosts are neutralized. But..."

"Reed died too," Marcos explains, hanging his head. "He used his power against Reeva. Took out most of the building."

John stays silent for a moment, closing his eyes. "Caitlin?" he asks. "The kids?"

"They're all alive," Lorna answers. "The Frosts made Andy and Lauren destroy the Sentinel Services building, we couldn't stop them in time."

She can almost see John try to think of the consequences of that and give up, exhausted. It's too much to fathom tonight.

"We'll think about that in the morning," Marcos echoes her thoughts.

There will be time, later, for reflection. For mourning, and for making new plans. Tonight they need rest. And they need each other.

"Let's go," Lorna says.

John nods, though his eyes are far away.

Lorna and Marcos each take one of his arms to help him level up. John sways, but he grips onto them tightly and stays standing. They start walking, very slowly, toward the exit.

"I'm staying here," Erg says. "I need to take care of them." He points at the bodies lying on the floor between the crates and the overturned furniture.

Marcos opens his mouth to protest, but John nods. "When you're done−"

"I know where to find you."

"Good," John says. "We'll need...everyone."

There is hesitation, pain in his voice, but Lorna's heart swells up at his words. He's talking of the future and including himself in it, in a way he hasn't since they reunited. He never expected to survive this day, she understands. He didn't want to. But now that he has, even though he's not out of the woods yet, he's thinking of what's to come.

* * *

I hope you enjoyed this sweet reunion. The story will keep going from here, I don't know where to exactly, but it will come. In time.

Tell me what you think!


	3. Chapter 3

It's been a while since I updated this story, but here is chapter 3.

* * *

"Someone's coming," John mutters weakly.

Marcos and Lorna make a concerted move to duck back into the shadows of the alley, and John bites back a groan. He's already struggling to keep his feet under him, knowing that the two of them can't take his full weight for long, but his left leg keeps giving out. And that's not even considering the agony that is his side, with his upper body forced up by Marcos's taller shoulders, even hunched over.

He leans against the wall with relief, while they wait for the old man taking out his trash to go back inside. Shirtless and covered in bandages, John is too conspicuous, and they can't afford to get noticed, not after what happened here today. The police and Sentinel Services most likely have his description, if not surveillance pictures, and they likely have identified him by now. Turner may not be able to talk for a while, but John will definitely have to lay low.

"Let's go," Marcos murmurs, hauling him back up.

John groans out loud this time. Zingo, at his feet, whines at him, but he doesn't have a free arm to pet her.

The rest of the way to the junk yard is painful and slow. John is barely conscious, letting his friends guide him as he focuses on putting one leg in front of the other.

He tries to shakes himself when they briefly stop in front of the warehouse.

"Caitlin? The kids?" he asks.

"They're already here," Lorna answers.

John nods.

"Just a few more minutes and you can rest," Marcos says.

Despite his exhaustion, despite the pain intensifying with every step, it's not rest that's on John's mind as he passes the threshold. It's these people, his friends, who made it through this devastating day−week−and the ones who didn't. He's close to the dead tonight.

Caitlin rises from the couch, where she's sitting with one of her children on each side, as soon as she hears them come in. Lauren and Andy look up, their faces streaked with tears.

"John," Caitlin says. Her relief is mixed with so much sadness that John chokes. He can't process it yet, Reed being gone, but he recognizes her pain instantly. His heart tugs. Reed and Clarice are both everywhere in this room still, Reed's trace stronger and more recent than Clarice's.

John removes his arms from his friends' shoulders and takes a couple of steps forward toward Caitlin. He stops before stumbling and opens his arms.

Caitlin breaches the distance between them and he hugs her tightly, careful not to put too much of his weight on her. He can feel the way her breathing picks up in his shoulder, the silent sobs wracking her body.

"I'm so sorry," John murmurs, and she looks up at him. A sad kind of understanding passes between them. Love, and loss, and pain. And holding on. John's throat knots up.

Caitlin nods through her tears.

John lets go of her when his legs give out under him, to avoid crushing her with his weight. He tries to break his fall with his arm instead, but Marcos and Lorna are the one who keep him from tumbling to the floor.

"John!" Caitlin exclaims. "Get him to the couch," she tells Marcos, who has one of John's arm around his shoulders again.

John hears her as if through a fog, the pain overtaking his senses. He doubles over, pressing his free hand to his stomach. The stabbing, throbbing pain is more brutal with every second.

"Table," Lorna says. "I need to take the bullets out."

He feels Marcos pulling him over to one of the workbenches, while Lorna clears it of the scrap metal covering the surface. John does his best to help his friend lift him onto the bench, but his strength is just gone. His head lolls to the side as soon as he's lying down, out of his control.

Caitlin takes a shocked breath when she cuts through Erg's makeshift bandages.

"That's a lot of wounds," she says. "John, I need you to tell me where it hurts most."

Barely comprehending her words, John blinks. He opens his mouth sluggishly, but it's hard to remember what he wants to say.

"John!" Lorna tries. "Where does it hurt?"

John moves his hands to his stomach again, slowly.

"There?" Caitlin asks. "In your side?"

John nods. "Leg, too," he murmurs. "Left."

"Okay, I'm going to have a look at this wound, alright?"

Things get confused after that for John. He's lost too much blood, and his brain isn't making sense of what's happening. There's a sudden, excruciating pain, followed by a moment of panic around him. John's side and hand feel wet, flooded with blood.

"Lauren!" Caitlin is yelling, desperately pressing on the wound Lorna just pulled a bullet from.

"Mom? What is it? Oh my God," Lauren is at their side in seconds. "What do you need me to do?"

"Keep pressure inside," Caitlin says. "Bullet hit a major vein, I can't widen the wound, so I can't reach far enough to stop the bleeding."

John groans as the pressure on his stomach goes.

"I think I've got it," Lauren says. "But I can't hold it forever. If you can't stitch it−"

"We'll have to cauterize it," Caitlin sighs. "Marcos?"

"I don't know if I can do this, Caitlin. Inside him, like this−"

"There's no choice," Caitlin says firmly.

John just hears Marcos take a deep breath, and Caitlin's frame keep him from seeing more of what's going on. He's not quite expecting the pain when it comes.

He can't keep in the scream. It burns like he's never been burned before. Lorna's hands are on his face, trying to keep him still, but he can barely hear her murmurs.

"Can't we put him to sleep or something?" Lorna asks, louder.

"I don't have any anesthetic, only painkillers," Caitlin answers. "He won't take them."

"No," John mutters, and even he is not entirely sure if he's responding to Caitlin's words or to the prospect of more pain. He can't keep track of who's around him any longer, but he feels Lorna's hands leave his skin. He tries to reach out, but makes a strangled sound when the pain only gets worse.

"John, it's okay, it's almost over," Lorna murmurs. She's lying, John knows, but he nods anyway.

"Lorna, I need you to take out the other bullets," Caitlin says. "We'll be more careful. Lauren, can you stay in case it happens again?"

"Of course, Mom."

John gets a glimpse of Lauren's face, tear tracks on her cheeks but a determined look in her eyes. She just lost her father, he remembers dimly. She shouldn't be here.

"Shouldn't be here," he mutters out loud.

"Who?" Marcos asks. "John, who shouldn't be here?"

"All of you. Should've...left me."

Lorna closes her eyes for a moment, her hands still in John's sweat-covered hair. "John," she says. "Look at me."

John obeys sluggishly.

"We could never leave you, okay? Watching you walk out that door this morning was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."

"But you left before," John mutters. He's not even sure what he's saying, his mind too clouded to think.

"And I'm sorry," Lorna says. "I will never leave again."

John looks at her for a while, lost, and nods. She won't leave. He can hold on to that.

Except everyone leaves. Those who don't just end up dying. Like Pulse, and Sonya. And Clarice. Clarice left _and_ then died.

"You should," he says, closing his eyes. "I'm...poison. Destroy everything."

"What?" Lorna shakes his head gently, but John can't find the strength to open his eyes again. "John, what are you saying?"

"He's probably delirious," Caitlin says. "He has a fever. It's from the shock."

"He's not warm," Lorna remarks. John hears them more and more dimly, his brain incapable of processing their words.

"He's lost too much blood for that. We need to treat his wounds quickly. I can't get an IV into him, so a transfusion is out. We just have to hope that he doesn't bleed out more."

* * *

Lorna sits on the floor beside the couch, where John lies asleep, his face flushed with fever. Taking out the rest of the bullets was excruciating, but he never passed out, though he wasn't even responding to her touch by the end. He's now covered in bandages again, clean and tidy like Caitlin can make them, after she swathed the wounds with burn cream. Marcos's power was efficient in stopping the bleeding, but his trembling hands left burns all around the bullet holes.

Lorna looks at John's face now, lined with pain even in sleep. She doesn't know if it's physical pain or grief, probably a mix of the two. His delirious mutters are concerning. Lorna doesn't know anyone who blames themselves more easily that John does, but if he truly believes that they should have left him to die…

She shakes the thought away and stands up. She hasn't slept, though it's morning and light is starting to come through the warehouse windows. She's been too tense, worried, reliving the events of the day.

Caitlin, Lauren and Andy are lying on the floor on blankets, in a corner of the room, but Lorna is fairly sure none of them slept either. They're holding onto each other, as if afraid to let go, and she can understand. Reed wasn't Lorna's friend, but even she feels his death sharply. And Clarice's, and Sage's, and even Fade's. They've lost far too much.

And so much of it is her fault. None of the Underground would even have gotten involved with Reeva if it wasn't for her. Sage and Fade followed _her_ to the Inner Circle, and Andy recently admitted to the same.

Marcos is outside, working on a car, protective glasses on his face.

"I didn't want to wake anyone up," he says when he sees Lorna. "I needed something to do."

"Yeah, me too," Lorna says, though she's so tired that she can barely walk straight. Sleep seems impossible to attain. Maybe later, when John wakes up and they get back to the apartments.

"Want to help?"

"Sure."

They work together for a while, and it's almost like before, when they would spend hours down in the vault at the station, making furniture and tools. Lorna lifts and shapes the metal pieces, bringing the totaled car back to it's original shape, and Marcos welds them together.

"You think John's gonna be okay?" Lorna asks, when they start working on the engine itself. Marcos's welding makes too much noise to talk, but this is more delicate work, and they're standing closer, almost touching.

"Caitlin says he should recover fine, though it will take a while," Marcos answers.

"I don't mean physically," Lorna says.

Marcos shakes his head. "I don't know. Losing Clarice… It hasn't been two days yet, but I can't see him come back from that easily. Hell, it hit me really hard, and she wasn't−" his voice breaks.

"She was your friend," Lorna says.

"Yes. A really good friend."

"I'm sorry."

"I know. I don't...I don't blame you, and I don't think John does either. What Jace Turner did is not on you."

"I still feel responsible," Lorna says. "But you don't need to try to comfort me. You're the one I should be comforting."

"Right now I'm mostly trying not to think about it. I can't...it's hasn't sunk in yet. Clarice, and Reed, all the Morlocks who died, and the Sentinel Services people...so much death..."

Marcos looks away and coughs, holding back tears.

"Me too," Lorna says. "Sage died too. Because of me. And Fade. I know he was trying to kill us, but...he was a friend, once."

"Where do we go from here? How do we...keep going?"

"We...we lean on each other. We help John get back on his feet, and we get through this."

"We've lost so much. _John_ has lost...so much. How do we help him?"

"By being there," Lorna says, without hesitation. "You remember, after we lost Pulse?"

Marcos nods. They thought, back then, that giving John space to grieve was the right thing to do, but he threw himself into work instead until he burned himself out. Lorna sees them again, lying beside John in his bed and holding onto him as he screamed through the worst migraine he ever had. She remembers the two weeks they spent taking care of him as he retreated into himself, sick and lost and numb, never leaving his room and crying himself to sleep.

She doesn't want to live through that again, but she will if it comes to it. She'll do whatever is needed to help John through this new grief, and get him to the other side.

"Last night, he said something about destroying everything," she says. "Do you know what he meant?"

Marcos sighs. "I'm not sure, but...the other day, before you came back, he said that...he felt like everyone he loves dies. After Clarice−"

"God," Lorna murmurs. "It does feel like that, doesn't it? Pulse, and Sonya, and now Clarice..."

"You know, after you left, I was so devastated that I never stopped to think about how John was feeling," Marcos says. "I acted like I was the only one suffering, and John was so selfless, like−"

"Like he always is," Lorna finishes. Until he collapses. She didn't see him cry once for Sonya, she realizes. Lorna and Marcos both cried at the memorial, and said their goodbyes, but John stood stoically throughout and then went right on to work.

"But he'd just lost Sonya, and his home, and...you...he's been going down a spiral of guilt and grief this whole time and I never saw it. I called him out, just before he got captured by Turner, over how reckless he was being, I said that he'd forgotten what we were fighting for, but−God… He's been taking huge risks and putting himself in danger because he was so afraid of losing someone else."

Lorna closes her eyes in dismay. How is John going to recover from this? From another loss?

"_Jace Turner took Clarice from me. He can't do anything worse."_

John has always been ready to sacrifice himself for his friends in a heartbeat, but he used to value his own life as much ad everyone else's. But he truly believed, yesterday, that his death or capture would be a small price to pay for stopping the Inner Circle. That his friends leaving and dying was his own fault, somehow, and that removing himself from the equation might keep them alive.

Lorna blinks when she realizes where her thoughts have taken her. The John she knew was sometimes depressed, sometimes reckless and rash, but never suicidal. But what she saw in his eyes yesterday before he went to meet the Purifier, the anguish in his voice when he said he destroyed everything… He's never been like this before.

She hasn't been there to watch his downward spiral, but the man lying on the couch in the warehouse is not the one she turned her back on nine months ago. And that man might well be gone forever.

"Are you alright?" Marcos asks, concerned.

Lorna looks up and realizes she's started crying without noticing. "I...no," she admits. "I don't know what to do."

"Come here," Marcos opens his arms.

Lorna leans into the hug and tries to concentrate on the moment, instead of the mistakes she made and the bleakness of their future.

"We're gonna make it though this," Marcos murmurs in her ear.

She wishes she could truly believe that.

* * *

I hope you liked this! There's more John whump to come, though the worst is over, but mostly reflections on mourning, being together, and rebuilding. I'm still not sure where this story is going and the progress is very slow, though.

Please give me a sign if you're still reading, whether it's a review, even just an emoji, or, I don't know, a flare? I need to know I'm not the only one still attached to this fandom (and I'll love you forever).


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